Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?

[Devin Jeanpierre]

On Sat, Jul 18, 2015 at 9:45 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
>> It gets really boring submitting 2.7-specific patches, though, when
>> they aren't accepted, and the committers have such a hostile attitude
>> towards it. I was told by core devs that, instead of fixing bugs in
>> Python 2, I should just rewrite my app in Python 3.
>
> Really? Can you point us to this discussion?

Yes, really. It was on #python-dev IRC.

> If you are right, and that was an official pronouncement, then it seems that
> non-security bug fixes to 2.7 are forbidden.

I never said it was a pronouncement, or official. It wasn't. I have no
idea where you got that idea from, given that I specifically have said
that I think non-security bug fixes are allowed.

> I suspect though that it's not quite that black and white. Perhaps there was
> some doubt about whether or not the patch in question was fixing a bug or
> adding a feature (a behavioural change). Or the core dev in question was
> speaking for themselves, not for all.

They weren't speaking for all. And, I never said they were. Nor did I
imply that they were.

Search your logs for https://bugs.python.org/issue17094 and
http://bugs.python.org/issue5315

I was most frustrated by the first case -- the patch was (informally)
rejected in favor of the "right" fix, and the "right" fix was
(informally) rejected because it changed behavior, leaving me only
with the option of absurd workarounds of a bug in Python, or moving to
python 3.

>> It has even been
>> implied that bugs in Python 2 are *good*, because that might help with
>> Python 3 adoption.
>
> Really? Can you point us to this discussion?
>
> As they say on Wikipedia, Citation Needed. I would like to see the context
> before taking that at face value.

Of course, it was a joke. The format of the joke goes like this:
people spend a lot of time debugging and writing bugfixes for Python
2.7, and you say:

  <dev2> guido wants all python 3 features in python 2, so ssbr` maybe
choose the right time to ask a backport ;-)
  <dev1> oh. if i would be paid to contribute to cpython, i would
probably be ok to backport anything from python 3 to python 2
  <dev1> since i'm not paid for that, i will to kill python 2, it must
suffer a lot

And that's about as close to logs as I am comfortable posting. Grep
your logs for that, too.



I don't like how this is being redirected to "surely you
misunderstood" or "I don't believe you". The fact that some core devs
are hostile to 2.x development is really bleedingly obvious, you
shouldn't need quotes or context thrown at you. The rhetoric almost
always shies _just_ short of ceasing bugfixes (until 2020, when that
abruptly becomes a cracking good idea). e.g. in "2.7 is here until
2020, please don't call it a waste".

I don't want to argue over who said what. I am sure everyone meant the
best, and I misunderstood them given a complicated context and a rough
day. Let's end this thread here, please.

-- Devin